


Homesickness

by sagetan



Category: Tennis no Oujisama | Prince of Tennis
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-04-16
Updated: 2007-04-16
Packaged: 2018-05-10 09:13:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 500
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5579826
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sagetan/pseuds/sagetan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kirihara, Yanagi, and homesickness or lack thereof.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Homesickness

He was seven when his father brought them to Singapore to visit an uncle, three weeks during the summer of his second grade. The cottage had been spacious and tidy, his older cousins friendly and sparse, and the weather always deliciously balmy.

He'd loathed Singapore after the first four days.

He thought often of his room with its peeling plaster and flickering lights, lying sleepless at night in a too-soft bed that was not his own and hating the cool, summer-scented breeze that whispered in past the open window.

Coming back to the dust-laced smell of home, empty and hushed and a little too chilly, felt like heaving a painful breath after drowning in warm, crystal blue water. He vowed never to leave the country after that.

He is nineteen when he forgets the ache of being too far from home and follows Yanagi to Shanghai during his first year of college. They share their assigned dorm with scuttling roaches, where the musty rugs don't quite cover the smell of rotting wood planks. The vents are clogged and the air is stale and too humid, the single battered divan coming apart at the seams.

They take turns cooking and doing the wash, and he discovers that the sputtering stove and rusting burners are not to fault for the undercooked rice and too-salty stir-fries Yanagi produces. He orders takeout when it's his turn, infallibly.

Sometimes he spends his free time sweeping the floor, gathering dust like wispy rain clouds before a shower, skin itching from the damp atmosphere. He makes a habit of taking an evening stroll along the crowded streets of the city, the jarring sounds of dwindling traffic distant and muffled by the jostling crowds. The thick city air is stripped of its heavy humidity after sunset, and the fresh night breath is a crisp reprieve to his senses.

The stifling heat in their rundown dorm is tempered by the small electric fan Yanagi borrows from a classmate. He doesn't wonder why he always finds it by his door come curfew, and merely moves it to the other bedroom every other night, so Yanagi doesn't toss and turn and sweat too much in the rickety old bed.

Sometimes during the day, when he is busy watering the drooping geraniums on the balcony, he catches himself thinking of his cactus withering on the windowsill back home.

Somehow, though, he never really misses Japan when he comes back in the evening to find the tiny kitchen filled with the eye-watering stink of smoke and freshly chopped onions, and Yanagi welcomes him back without looking up from casually tipping the burnt scrambled eggs into the trashcan.

Shanghai is not Kanagawa, and their cramped fifth-storey dorm will never be home.

 _But this_ , he thinks as Yanagi smiles and wraps slender, miraculously cool fingers around his own, teaching him calligraphy on the worn kitchen table with the takeout cartons forgotten at their elbows, _whatever this is, is enough_.

(Home is where the heart is.)

**Author's Note:**

> First posted on LJ one million years ago (2007) in my heady embarrassing tenipuri heydays, now here for archival purposes.
> 
> Prompt: Kirihara-- Homesickness/Too far from home


End file.
